We got word of a broccoli field that was going to be plowed over in a couple of days. I don't know how they harvest but they only take heads a certain size and they leave the rest. My wife, son, and I went tonight. The field would have been about 25 acres. The owner's sister was there and she said "Take all you want and don't worry about making a mess as it's all getting plowed out". The broccoli was incredible! We literally filled the trunk of the Buick. I love my wife's cream of broccoli soup and broccoli with cheese sauce so this was a major score. We'll freeze a bunch and we gave a bunch away tonight to friends and neighbors. Earlier today I noticed one head of broccoli at Sobeys was 4 bucks. At that price I figure I had 500 bucks worth in the trunk!
It's a damn shame with all these food shortages all these vegetables getting plowed under. The lady said she'd let us know when we can pick from their cauliflower field as well as brussel sprouts and I also got word of an onion field that will be available for gleaning in a week or so. My wife was invited to pick leftover blueberries from an organic feild last week. We are going to invest in another decent used freezer as ours is already full. If you are on a budget there are a lot of local online groups that list where gleaning is allowed and for a bit of sweat equity you can literally get enough local produce to last all winter.
That's awesome, Todd. We've been eating off our vegetable garden for the last couple of weeks but now my mother-in-law has ordered I don't know how many bushels of tomatoes to prepare for sauce for the winter.
What a great idea, good to hear you got a large haul. Is is sad that we hear so much about food insecurity and this sort of waste goes on. Hopefully they can find some way to get it distributed.
63 Parisienne sport coupe (The Big GTO), black, maroon interior, 409 4 speed; former owner of a 59 El Camino, 63 Corvette SWC, 62 Chev Bel Air SC. 1963- Pontiac top selling car in Canada
Mahone Bay, NS Still not old enough to need an automatic
And barley! In fact there is so much barley on PEI this year the farmers are running out of places to store it. At work (my last day is tomorrow) we have two 500 tonne silos just about full of it. Every grain elevator is full to capacity right now and I hear in western PEI last week it was an 8 hour wait to get trucks unloaded. I (working by myself running a 16 silo facility) unloaded 18 trucks last Wednesday. Here's a photo from Wednesday late afternoon. The trucks are lined up around the facility. The last truck in the photo rolled in at 4pm and didn't leave until 9.
They all needed the same unloading pit except the truck on the left- he was unloading wheat which goes to a different set of silos. The other trucks were barley and oats. Since it's not a huge unload area it takes 45 mins to an hour to unload a tractor trailer of barley or oats. Peas and wheat flows much quicker and usually unloaded in 20-30 minutes.
We currently have wheat, peas, barley and oats in storage. Unfortunatley while some parts of this job were quite interesting it was too much for one guy in his mid 50's to run by himself. Lots of climbing ladders, digging through grain in a silo to reach broken roll pins etc. I worked the most hours I've ever worked at a job in my life last week -70.5 hours.
A bit OT but it goes to show you that there is quite a diverse amount of agriculture on this little island. I had some great conversations with farmers over the past few weeks.
